Latest News in Black Art features updates and developments in the world of art and related culture

AWARDS & HONORS

Ingrid Pollard Wins Hasselblad Photography Award
The Hasselblad Foundation announced British photographer Ingrid Pollard is the recipient of the 2024 Hasselblad Award, one of the top photography prizes in the world. The honor includes a cash award of SEK 2,000,000 (nearly US $200,000), a gold medal, and a Hasselblad camera. Pollard “uses photography to question deeply engrained social and cultural constructs behind race, identity, community, and gender. Her work reveals subtle and starkly evident injustices through her engagement with the British landscape, iconography, and identity, as well as challenging the medium of photography and its history.” In 2022, Pollard was nominated for the Turner Prize. She was born in Guyana, grew up in London, and is now based in Northumberland, Northeast England. Pollard will be honored at an Oct. 11 ceremony in Gothenburg, Sweden. An exhibition of her work opens the same day at the Hasselblad Center, accompanied by a new publication. (3/8) | More

Amina Agueznay Wins South African Art Prize
Norval Foundation and The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF) announced Amina Agueznay is the grand prize winner of the 2024 Norval Sovereign African Art Prize. “I’m over the moon and honored more than anything else,” Agueznay said. The Moroccan-born multi-media artist earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Her work will be on view through May 12, along with contributions by the other finalists, in a group exhibition at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa. The honor includes a $35,000 prize and the opportunity to present a solo exhibition at the Norval Foundation. (2/19) | CNN

ALBERTA WHITTLE, “Genealogies of Chosen Family (Sekai Machache),” 2024 (acrylic with water from the Osun River, Nigeria, on linen, painted wooden frame with fretwork, 68 7/8 x 62 1/2 x 2 3/8 inches / 174.9 x 158.8 x 6 cm). | © Alberta Whittle, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects

REPRESENTATION

Alberta Whittle Joins Regen Projects
Regen Projects in Los Angeles announced its representation of Alberta Whittle. Her multidisciplinary practice is “motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-Blackness.” She works across sculpture, drawing, digital collage, film, performance, and writing. “Alberta Whittle: Learning a new punctuation for hope in times of disaster,” her inaugural exhibition with the gallery, opened March 16. The show features “Lagareh – The Last Born” (2022), a single-channel video, with a series of paintings and sculpture. Born in Barbados, Whittle is based in Glasgow, Scotland. She represented Scotland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. (2/14)| More

Mendes Wood Represents Julien Creuzet
Mendes Wood DM added French artist and poet Julien Creuzet (right) to its roster. In April, Creuzet is representing France with a solo exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale. He produces sculpture, installations, and textual interventions that explore his “diasporic experience. Inspired by the poetic and philosophical reflections of Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant on creolization and migration, Creuzet’s work focuses on the troubled intersection of the history of Martinique and the events of European modernity.” Mendes Wood was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, and has locations in New York, Brussels, and Paris. Creuzet’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will be on view in Brussels in 2025. He also works with Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Document Space in Chicago. (2/23) | Artdaily

Mendes Wood Adds Coco Fusco
New York-based, Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco joined Mendes Wood DM. Over the past three decades, her research-based practice has focused on “the complexities of race, colonialism, exile, gender, identity, and the shaping of possible new societies.” Fusco works across performance, video, exhibition practice, archival research, and formal writings. A retrospective of the artist, “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” (2023) was presented at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany. In 2025, the show travels to the MACBA in Barcelona, Spain. Her video installation “Coco Fusco: Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” is currently on view at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, Calif. Mendes Wood was founded in São Paulo, Brazil, and has locations in New York, Brussels, and Paris. Last fall, the gallery presented “With Others in Mind,” Fusco’s first solo exhibition in São Paulo. (2/21) | More

IMAGE: Above right, Julien Creuzet. | Photo by Virginie Ribaut

APPOINTMENTS

New CEO at Black Museum Association
Vedet Coleman-Robinson was promoted to president and CEO of the Association of African American Museums (AAAM), a member organization that supports museums and individual professionals focused on African and African American art, history, and culture. Before accepting a staff role, Coleman-Robinson served on AAAM’s membership committee. Previously, she spent 11 years at the National Park Service focusing on grant programs for the State, Tribal, Local, Plans & Grants Division and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. (3/26) | More

Heckscher Museum Hires New Operations Director
The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, N.Y., appointed Evan Waddy-Farr to the newly created role of director of operations and strategic initiatives. Waddy-Farr is a Morehouse alum who brings more than a dozen years of experience, including nonprofit operations and development, project management, grant writing, and a background in K-12 teaching and working with youth. Previously, he was director of curriculum and director of development at 4th Family Inc., in Albany, N.Y., a nonprofit focused on teen mentorship. He started at the museum in January. (2/9) | More

DESIGN

Cookware by Chef Eric Adjepong at Crate & Barrel
Chef Eric Adjepong has a new collaboration with Crate & Barrel, a 60-piece collection featuring cookware, serveware, glassware, textiles, and decor. The designs are inspired by his Ghanaian heritage and New York City, where he was born and raised. The selections include a large-sized ridged wood mortar and pestle (asanka); jewel-toned, organic-shaped dinnerware; and metal trivets in the form of a Sankofa bird and the Nea Onnim symbol. Adjepong is an alum of Top Chef season 16 and has become a regular on the Food Network, competing on “Tournament of Champions,” hosting “Alex vs. America,” co-starring on “Beachside Brawl,” and recently launching a new show, “Wildcard Kitchen.” He is the author of the children’s book “Sankofa: A Culinary Story of Resilience and Belonging” and his first cookbook coming soon. (3/21) | More

FILM

Film Directors Buy Westwood Movie Theater
A diverse group of 36 film directors, including Gina Prince-Bythewood, Steven Spielberg, and Bradley Cooper, purchased a Los Angeles movie theater that has hosted countless premieres over the decades. Jason Reitman led the acquisition of the Village Theater in the Westwood village community adjacent to UCLA. The historic theater first opened in 1931 and last summer was put on the market for $12 million. The directors acted to save the theater out of concern that the big-screen moviegoing experience is in jeopardy and to prevent the landmark from potentially being torn down and replaced by new development. Rian Johnson, Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Nolan, Lulu Wang, Alfonso Cuarón, and Justin Lin, are also among the directors involved. “Once renovated, the Village Theater will showcase a mixture of first-run films and repertory programming curated by the group,” according to the report. “The collective also intends to keep the theater open while plans for a restaurant, bar and gallery are finalized.” (2/21) | New York Times

Travis Kelce is Co-Producing Basquiat Documentary
“Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” a sprawling exhibition of rarely seen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat was organized by the artist’s estate. The show opened in New York in 2022, traveled to Los Angeles, and was accompanied by a catalog. Now a feature documentary of the same name is underway with Boardwalk Pictures and Quinn Wilson, Lizzo’s former creative director. NFL star Travis Kelce is among the producers. He is a tight end on the Kansas City Chiefs, who won the Super Bowl last month. The Basquiat project is Kelce’s second foray into the film world following his executive producer role on “My Dead Friend Zoe.” The dark comedy cost less than $10 million to make and was the first film financed with renewable energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. “King Pleasure” has been in the works since summer 2023. (2/13) | Variety

MORE NEWS

Oprah’s WeightWatchers Stock Goes to Smithsonian Museum
Oprah Winfrey announced she is leaving the board of directors of WeightWatchers International and donating her WW shares to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. She had served on the WW board since 2015 and appeared in commercials for the weight loss and weight management company. The billionaire media mogul held 1.1 million shares of WW, making her the largest individual stakeholder, owning 1.43 percent of the company. The stake was worth about $3.18 million at the time of the announcement, according to reports. She will continue to collaborate with the company and “intends to donate the proceeds from any future exercises of her WW stock options to NMAAHC.” Winfrey is an advisory council member, founding supporter, and the largest donor to the Smithsonian museum. Her previous gifts total $13 million. (2/28) | More
CT

One of the best-known photographs from Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s a Laugh shows his father, Ray, in their Black Country council flat mid-fall, caught between an armchair and the carpet, his head about to crash into a tray and a wooden picture frame. The first time I saw the picture I was struck by the eerie passivity of a drunk’s face. Ray shows no pre-emptive wince, no anticipation of pain. I was reminded of the shocking and sometimes beautiful way that an inebriated person’s body can collapse and fall through the air. This is partly why a drunk person is at greater risk of death from a blow or a fall. They lack tension. They have become an object, vulnerable to the whims of their surroundings.

Ray’s a Laugh was an instant success on its publication by Scalo Press in 1996. Billingham took the photographs while studying for an art foundation course in Birmingham, originally intending them as source material for paintings rather than artworks in and of themselves, as he tells it. When Billingham went on to do a fine art degree at the University of Sunderland, his tutor Julian Germain saw the photographs and recognised their promise as autonomous works. He showed them to his friend Michael Collins, who was then the picture editor of The Telegraph Magazine, and they helped Billingham publish them as a book.

The early images show Ray in black and white and, later, Billingham’s mother Liz, his brother Jason, family friends and relatives in colour. Ray was a chronic alcoholic. He had always been a drinker, and the habit had worsened after he was made redundant from the local engineering factory when Billingham was a child. Liz was not a drinker, but she smoked heavily and appeared to assuage the chaos and frustration of life with her husband through a strong affection for and identification with sentimental nicknacks and pets.

Jason, seven years Billingham’s junior, and described by his brother as a “dosser”, was taken into foster care aged 11. It was Jason who gave Billingham’s book its title, saying of their father: “Ray’s a laugh, but I wouldn’t like to be like him.” The work is now being reissued, comprising not only the images in the 1996 book but dozens more from the same period, using Billingham’s original vision for the sequencing in a kind of extended director’s cut.

Billingham began photographing his father during a period when his mother had moved to an adjacent tower block, unable to tolerate Ray’s alcoholism. In her absence, his life had emptied out even further. “He didn’t eat anything for about 18 months. He didn’t have a telly, he didn’t listen to the radio, he just looked out the window and drank,” Billingham said in an interview for the British Film Institute.

Billingham was interested in capturing the tragedy of this solitude, the airless days in which time-markers no longer seemed to matter, but he was also drawn to the aesthetic arrangement of his father’s body in its various states of collapse. The way he fell this way or that seemed like useful compositional references for the paintings that Billingham has always said were his primary ambition. When Germain, his tutor, had initially seen some of these early photos he had felt a sense of discomfort. “I had the impression that nothing was held back,” Germain recalls to Liz Jobey in an essay published in Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader, which accompanies the reissue, “that he was showing me something the vast majority of people would probably feel uncomfortable about in relation to their parents.”

This would be the first of many ethical queries levied at Billingham, who appears largely to have taken them in his stride. After Billingham’s 1997 show at Luhring Augustine in New York, the artist and writer Martha Rosler wrote of “his greatly enlarged instant-camera colour photos of his drunken father and brother and his rot-toothed mother in their sorry council-house flat”, claiming that “without a sense of the social, only the personal remains, and a look at the merely personal is an invitation to voyeurism”. Her distaste was both aesthetic and moral — not only were the images, in her view, ugly, but Billingham had failed to use their ugliness in support of an argument. And yet the absence of social commentary — that Billingham was not using the pictures to make a point — was what others loved and were fascinated by. The journalist Lynn Barber, in a profile of Billingham for The Observer in 2000, wrote: “I care passionately about the Billinghams, precisely because they are not presented as social problems but as riotously colourful individuals.”

That some viewers are unable to parse anything but tragedy in the photographs, while others comment first on the moments of light that burst through says something about how they have been consumed: as art or, depending on the view, as journalistic documentation. These are not happy lives, that goes without saying — their home is filthy, their horizons extremely limited, their bodies ravaged. There are, though, moments of joy and communion, as there are in any life. A picture of Liz feeding a newborn kitten with a dropper, a look of sheer, exuberant glee on her face. Another of Liz and Ray passionately embracing. Or Ray sitting with his arm around his dog with a look of something near calmness and pride on his face. Then there are the images of bodily breakdown: Ray openly bleeding after a fight with no attempt to stem it, or upright with a dazed expression next to a toilet encrusted with filth. It’s not that there are any images that contradict the general impression of bleakness, exactly. I think, rather, they are all so raw and abject that they convey pure, actual life, and the persistence of actual life is always heartening on some level, even if its specifics are unhappy.

When asked about the ethics of presenting his family as he did, Billingham was sanguine, almost as if confused by the question. That was what his parents were like, after all. It’s not as though he had cynically staged photographs of them to imply false narratives. He was telling a story, though. In an interview, he compared his vision for the series to a play. All narrative building involves creation of a sort, and his closeness to the people he photographed makes for an exhilarating and unapologetic subjectivity. He is not a journalist, after all, and where he considers himself to have failed, it is for producing images that could have been made by a journalist. In the 2000 interview with Barber, he described a photo of his parents eating side by side on the sofa, saying of it: “It looks like any hack photographer could have come in and taken this photograph — it doesn’t show you anything about the relationship I have with them.” When asked in an interview with Robert Yates in 1996 what his family made of the images, Billingham said he’d wondered if they would perhaps force new insight, reveal themselves to themselves. Instead, they laughed, saying, “Don’t we look odd?”

I came across Ray’s a Laugh while researching depictions of alcoholism for a character I was writing in my second novel. I have known many heavy drinkers, myself included, but have never been very close to a person with chronic, late-stage alcoholism. A relative of mine was as close as I had personally come, and that wasn’t especially near. Other family members, closer to the person by relation and in age, had been the ones to give what care was possible. I would only hear second-hand descriptions of the state of the living quarters, of the person’s refusal to hear criticism. I listened to various people who knew them in their long-ago past, of their charisma and beauty and humour, and then to the descriptions of the current detritus and ill health so accelerated it was scarcely health at all any more. Nothing was sustained or nourished; the ailing living corpse was simply being maintained, as it marched towards its demise.

I saw Billingham’s photographs and understood instantly the feeling that needed drawing: it was one of receding surroundings. The alcoholic’s world is slowly reduced from the moment they begin to need alcohol, and it continues to shrink as the need expands. Some alcoholics have the means to at least portray the idea of expansiveness. A wealthy drunk can more easily conceal their need, for a time, by shrouding it in the social frivolities in which drinking is normal and expected. They can go to restaurants and launches and drink beautiful ice-cold martinis. An impoverished drunk, on the other hand, lacks the artifice. They can only afford the units, not the pantomime of justification. In these cases, like that of my family member by the time I was aware of their addiction, the world becomes horribly whittled down to the small space in which they are drinking. I thought of this lately while taking care of a cat who doesn’t go outside. The cat is obsessed with food because food is the only narrative marker in its day. Time, for the alcoholic, is essentially formless except for the way that drink maps it. In a book of art writing published in 2009, Gordon Burn, another great British chronicler of working-class disintegration, likened Billingham’s interests to those of Raymond Carver, observing that both portrayed “an indoor world”. That was it for me: an indoor world. A world that is vanishingly thin and yet still contains all the variance and complexity of human life.

I have written about my family intermittently in articles and essays over the past 10 years, and when I give workshops and classes, people who would like to write memoir sometimes ask how I have managed to square it with them. Mine is an unsatisfactory response, but one I believe is the only honest one. My family happened to be the sort of people who tolerated my intrusions. They may not have always liked it but they understood it and never resented me for it in ways more significant than could be discussed and resolved. I think they know that my impulse to write about them is not compelled by a desire for cheap revelations or shock value, but by my need to understand them. I don’t always feel fully a part of my family and so I need to look at it from the outside, turn it around as an object in my mind to comprehend it better.

Members of my family have had their different ways of dealing with it, much as they are differently represented in my work. My parents read everything I write and have sometimes been dismayed by the way I present myself or my background. My brothers have never read my novels, nor many of my essays, which I was shocked and upset to learn earlier this year but ultimately understand.

It’s not a useful answer, because it’s pure luck. It reminds me, though, of what I think about the question of auto-fiction (autobiography that allows substantial creative intervention). When asked if auto-fiction is good, or worthwhile, as a form, the only answer I can provide is that when a good writer writes it, it’s worthwhile and when a bad one does, it isn’t. Can you involve your family in your art, expose them and still be in their lives? Well, you can if they’re like mine, and you may not be able to if they’re not. The author Karl Ove Knausgård famously revealed the detritus of his late father’s alcoholism in the first book of his My Struggle series, and was never forgiven by some members of his family.

The photographer Martin Parr described, in alarmingly cavalier phrasing, the people he photographed as the “objects I am using”. By coincidence, as I write this essay, I am also working on an audio documentary about the Irish playwright and novelist Brendan Behan, who once described the Irish people as “not my audience; they are my raw material”. Behan was another artist whose portrayal of his working-class surroundings was simultaneously marvelled at and recoiled from by its middle-class witnesses. He, too, showed people who, by tradition, should be rendered only as naive figures of tragedy as people possessed of actual, complex personhood, mired as they may be in poverty and misfortune and decay. Burn diagnosed Billingham as being in possession of Graham Greene’s “splinter of ice”, and there is no denying that the ability to reveal one’s family in this manner is not usual, but nor is it usual to be able to reveal a world with such totality, as Billingham does here. I am thinking about what it’s like to see an image of Ray’s back, sloped and soft and emerging painfully from bed and, a few pages later, another image of Jason’s back, young and tough but strained, veins popping as though braced for what is coming down the line.

The writer Andrew Solomon once described depression as a disease of privacy, adding that “the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison”. Alcoholism, too, is a disease of privacy. To show it is not disgraceful. To refuse to see it is disgraceful. To perceive its revelation as salacious is disgraceful. Ray’s a Laugh compels us to see what is not commonly seen, and that is the most we can ask of a work of art.

Megan Nolan’s latest novel “Ordinary Human Failings” is published by Jonathan Cape
“Ray’s a Laugh” and “Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader” is published by Mack

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Entries are now being accepted for the Wings Over Muscatatuck photo contest at the Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge near Seymour.

The subject is “Birds of Muscatatuck NWR.” Photos must be prints by non-commercial photographers that are at least 5- by 7-inches and not larger than 11- by 14-inches. Previous winning entries are ineligible. Entries may not be significantly altered from the original image although cropping, lighting and darkening is permitted.

Contest entries must be mounted on a stiff backing (such as cardboard/foamboard) and no frames or hanging wires are permitted.

Two entries are allowed per person and names are not permitted on the front of the entry. Entries will be judged in adult and youth (under 18) categories. An entry form (available at the refuge) must be attached to the back. Entries need to be submitted to the office or Visitor Center by 4 p.m. on May 4 to be included in the contest.

Winning entries will receive ribbons, be displayed in the Visitor Center during Wings Over Muscatatuck, and be shown on refuge media sites and newsletters.

Photography contest entries will be on display at the refuge visitor center from the date judged through the end of May.

For information about the contest, contact the refuge office at 812-522-4352 x 12, or e-mail [email protected].

• Terence Tempest, 70, said firm was ‘heartbroken’ and offer was ‘unacceptable’

By Ben Endley and Elena Salvoni

Published: 21:59 EDT, 29 March 2024 | Updated: 22:12 EDT, 29 March 2024

Questions are urgently being asked over who is to blame for the proposed editing out of disabled children from school photos, with a boss of the photography firm at the centre of the scandal insisting ‘it is not company policy.’

Terence Tempest, 70, was unable to explain why parents had been given the option – as he vowed to investigate how the fiasco came to be.

He revealed ‘heartbroken’ bosses were locked in crisis meetings to discover ‘what the hell happened’, and described the suggestion to delete children with complex needs from the class pictures as ‘unacceptable’.

Families were left ‘devastated’ after three children at Aboyne Primary School in Scotland were removed from images sent via an internet link, giving parents the option to order a photo without them in it.

The revelations have sparked widespread outrage, including from Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, who last night described the incident at the Aberdeen school as ‘really dreadful’. 

Speaking from his £3m riverside home near Falmouth, Cornwall, Mr Tempest said: ‘We’re heartbroken. We have released a statement but at the moment I’m just trying to find out what stimulated this and what the hell happened.

‘It’s just unacceptable, I don’t know what’s happened. It’s certainly not a policy of ours.

‘We had a crisis meeting this morning, we are having another one this afternoon.’

Asked whether he would apologise to the families involved, Mr Tempest said: ‘Of course I understand how upset the families must be, I would be too.

‘If I was in that position I would want an apology. I don’t run the company and I’m in touch with the managing director at the moment and they will decide what to do.’

Mr Tempest was unable to explain why parents were given the option to choose photos without children with additional support needs and says the freelance photographer may have decided to do it. 

He said: ‘I’m not sure what the current policy is frankly, it depends what we are asked to do. We just respond to what we are asked for.

‘We have got another meeting coming up and will find out whether the photographer was asked to do it. Did they do it off their own back?’

Businesswoman mother-of-two Natalie Pinnell, 38, told MailOnline the decision to omit her nine-year-old daughter Erin from her class photo had ‘devastated’ their family.

She described the decision taken by Cornwall-based Tempest Photography as ‘inhumane’ and said her child had been ‘erased from history’.

Ms Pinnell said: ‘You can’t erase them because they’re inconvenient. It’s just not OK.

‘It’s devastating to have your child be erased from a photo or give parents a choice whether she should or should not be included. 

‘She is the most beautiful human being. Who could do this?

‘I’m grateful that she’s not aware of it because the damage that would do to her self-esteem would be devastating.  

‘But I’m having to tell my other daughter about what’s happening to her sister. I’m not sure I’m going to sleep tonight.’

Natalie, who runs a business management and strategy company in Aboyne, said she was left fuming after she got an email from the school with two photo links – one that included her daughter and one that didn’t. 

Another class that had a disabled girl in a wheelchair also had two photos – one with the schoolgirl and one without.

Natalie added: ‘I queried it with the school and they queried it with the photographer. He said ”yes, that’s what we have done.”

‘It’s been the most traumatic experience as a family that we have felt.

‘I really wanted to believe there was a different reason. I was trying to look for a reason why someone would have made that decision.

‘We have mourned. We have hurt. I feel like I haven’t even hit the bottom of my shock. It’s been absolutely devastating.

‘The worst part was when I was talking to a friend about what happened and she found that there were two links for her daughter.’

Natalie said the school, which has a dedicated additional needs hub, had vowed never to use the company again.

She added: ‘It has been a hard thing to process as a family. As a mum I want to champion her, and to have people thinking she is erasable is just devastating beyond belief.

‘To give parents a choice whether or not to include one individual child because she doesn’t fit in with it all is beyond comprehension.’

Natalie wasn’t the only mother outraged by the shocking decision.

Lisa Boyd’s nine-year-old daughter Lily Nicolson, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, was also omitted from one of the class photos, along with another boy. 

She said: ‘This is clear discrimination and shouldn’t happen in a school or anywhere.

‘It is the worst that Lily has been treated in her entire life. The school is so inclusive, Lily is included in everything the school does.

‘Her twin sister, Iona, is in a different class and I only got one photo for that class but I got two for Lily’s – one without my kid in it. It’s horrendous.’

Another outraged mother Natalie Wild, 45, also revealed toay how a photographer from the same company asked her daughter Tilly who has serious eyesight problems to take off her thick glasses for a picture. 

Ms Wild, a commercial property developer, said the request made her daughter feel ‘vulnerable and scared’ as she relies on her 17 times magnification glasses, and considers them to be part of her.

She complained to the company after the incident in September 2022 when Tilly was in Year One at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Primary School in Spinkhill, Derbyshire.

But after she was told that it should not have happened, another photographer from the firm made the same request to her daughter on the company’s return to the school to take annual pictures last September.

The company says it is investigating.

The First Minister was asked about the reports as he visited a soft play centre in Cumbernauld. He said it was ‘shameful, really dreadful’.

He told the PA news agency: ‘It should never have happened at all.

‘I don’t want to see another single example of that anywhere in Scotland. It’s not acceptable, not right.

‘And I’m pleased the council responsible has apologised.’